A Vision to Avoid Demolition for a ’70s Pioneer

Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago, the subject of a continuing preservation battle.Credit
Nathan Weber for The New York Times

CHICAGO — A familiar sort of preservation battle has been stewing for months here over the fate of the old Prentice Women’s Hospital, a concrete, cloverleaf structure from 1975 by Bertrand Goldberg, the Chicago architect. It’s a groundbreaking, wonderful oddball among the architectural monuments in this city. High-profile designers like Frank Gehry, Jeanne Gang, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien have signed petitions entreating Northwestern University, which owns the building, not to tear it down, arguing for landmark status and pleading for Mayor Rahm Emanuel to step in.

The university says it needs new biomedical research facilities and that Prentice is too small, old and quirky to feasibly retrofit. A new building, the university argues, would bring to the city millions of investment dollars, create jobs and save lives.

No surprise, Northwestern has been winning the debate. On Monday Brendan Reilly, an alderman representing the Chicago ward that includes Prentice, announced that he was leaning toward demolition. “I remain open to suggestions,” he added, according to The Chicago Tribune. “And believe me, if there’s a eureka moment, I’m all ears.”

So here is a suggestion: Build a research tower on top of Prentice.

I brought up this notion with Ms. Gang, probably the most celebrated architect of the current generation here in Chicago, when we stopped to look at the building the other afternoon. I was curious about a strategy of accretion, layering. Although an advocate for preservation, Ms. Gang embraced the thought and ran with it. I’ll get to her plan in a moment.

First things first: Why save Prentice? Many Chicagoans hate it. The taste for concrete buildings from the ’70s is unpopular outside architectural circles, although it’s spreading, and rightly so. Great late-Modernist buildings, innovative and ruggedly beautiful, deserve respect and, increasingly, careful custody. Prentice is a good example. Beyond relieving the monotony of nearby glass towers, Prentice mixes muscle with sensuous curves. Goldberg, who died in 1997, used a pioneering form of computer modeling to engineer a tour de force: an open, seven-story maternity ward inside the cloverleaf shell, cantilevered 45 feet from the supporting core. The building can suggest a flower adorned with sets of twinned oval portholes.

It also translated new ideas about hospital “villages” of care into unobstructed floors around a central nurses’ station. Goldberg’s design had a practical logic, in other words, beyond jolting the cityscape.

That said, the building is not suited for 21st-century research labs, and preservationists straining to prove otherwise have not helped their own cause. A suggestion to erect a tower atop Prentice’s broad podium, alongside the cloverleaf (think of the wing next to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York) went nowhere, too, struggling unpersuasively as it did to salvage Goldberg’s plan. Meanwhile, the Women’s Hospital decamped five years ago for a new building, and the psychiatric institute that occupied the rectangular podium moved out last year. So Prentice has become a sitting duck.

Leaving aside whether Northwestern ought to reconsider putting the lab it wants elsewhere in Streeterville, as the neighborhood is called, a long history of architecture points toward a different line of argument. Great buildings have often survived the wrecking ball by being added to, incorporated into larger structures or updated for a new era — in Rome and Istanbul, New York and Chicago.

Certain buildings, even neighborhoods, can’t be altered without being ruined. But all buildings exist in the real world, as do we.

And however morphing compromises an original design, buildings can become more fascinating and attractive as they accumulate new lives.

Photo

The architect Jeanne Gang's vision for a new research tower on top of the hospital.Credit
Studio Gang Architects; Illustration, Jay Hoffman

Adding on top of the old Prentice is intended as a thought exercise in what might be called a third way that may not always get its due in preservation battles.

And this is where Ms. Gang comes in, compellingly. After our conversation she rapidly crafted a concept for a 31-story skyscraper atop the cloverleaf.

There would be almost 600,000 square feet of new space inside a scalloped tower, rising to 680 feet,adding a shapely new landmark to the skyline. I telephoned Christina Morris, senior field officer for the Chicago office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and without showing her Ms. Gang’s concept drawing, floated the tower idea. She was receptive. Many preservationists would welcome “any creative solution that we all could talk about,” she said.

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Al Cubbage, Northwestern’s spokesman, said preservationists had never proposed building on top of Prentice. “The conversation has been that it must be preserved as is,” he emphasized. He would not say whether the university would entertain such a notion, but he reiterated that on the Prentice site the university wants 300,000 to 500,000 square feet for research labs on open floors with high ceilings — all achieved in Ms. Gang’s plan — that could connect to the Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center next door.

Her skywalks connecting the two buildings probably don’t allow enough links to satisfy the university, but the connections the university says it wants sound roughly conceived, and this could be worked out.

In Ms. Gang’s concept, Goldberg’s building — with the removal of an ugly 1980s addition that obscured the cloverleaf’s concrete arches — provides 250,000 additional square feet for medical offices, classrooms, restaurants, whatever. The university says it wants to be a good neighbor. Diversifying the neighborhood while incorporating Goldberg’s building into some new structure would allow the university to save lives, develop a healthier urban plan and sustain a special work of local culture, which is also what great universities do.

The serendipity of Prentice is that it is formally and structurally suited for adaptation. Its core, like the stem of a flower, provides a ready-made means to fortify the building’s foundation, reduce vibrations and install elevator shafts and other support to a tower, which could have its own access.

Ron Klemencic, president of Magnusson Klemencic Associates, an international structural engineering firm with an office in Chicago (he has worked with Ms. Gang), told me that the tower plan seems practicable and maybe even economical. He cited 111 South Wacker, a Chicago skyscraper on which he worked, which reused and bolstered the existing foundations of a smaller building to erect a taller one; and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Tower, also here, a 30-story structure from the mid-1990s, topped off with 25 more stories a decade later.

“It’s a welcoming form in the city, as opposed to another big solid box,” Ms. Gang said of her design, with its inward-swerving scallops doing a pas de deux with the lobes of the cloverleaf.

The building becomes a totem pole, with different strata of history. Ms. Gang describes it as a strategy, instead of a metaphor, similar to stacked solutions in computing. “More uses in the same tall site are better for the city,” she translated. “But in any case, this is not about my doing the job. It’s about opening up a dialogue.”

It is, and other plans ought to emerge. Chicago needs jobs and health. Northwestern needs to avoid the ignominy of having torn down a landmark. And sometimes a third way is the best way.